Business

Anthony Ha is a writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media, advertising, and startups. Previously, he was a staff technology writer at Adweek, worked as a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and was also a reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing.... ? Learn More Just as the tech press was busy talking about the first academic paper on acqui-hires, another acqui-hire deal closed, with online ad company AppNexus acquiring fantasy sports startup Fantuition. Co-founder and CEO Pat McCarthy announced the deal in a blog post that also recounts some of Fantuition’s history and discusses McCarthy’s feelings about being acqui-hired (or, as he spells it, “acqhired”, because no one can agree on the spelling of this awkward, awkward word) — in other words, getting acquired by another company just so that they can hire your team, while your product gets shut down. McCarthy says t...

A French t-shirt company has brazenly picked a fight with one of the world’s fiercest hacker groups. Anonymous, known for crippling the world’s most secure websites (including the FBI’s), has vowed revenge against apparel company, Early Flicker, who registered the hacker group’s logo as their own intellectual property. “Their arrogance and ignorance of what they have done will not go unpunished,” promised Anonymous, in a YouTube video (below). “Anonymous will take down any business they have going on the internet and the ninety nine per cent will not stop until the registration has been revoked and a public apology has been made. The name of Anonymous will not be the whore of the world.” Even if E-Flicker managed to escape the wrath of hackers, the logo is already registered under a Creative Commons intellectual property license, according to a tweet from an Anonymous account: To these copyright trolls: About all # Anonymous logos are already licensed under creative commons. So good...

Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More So here’s the real story behind App.net founder Dalton Caldwell’s plans to build a new, open API framework for developers to build off of. According to him, Facebook pressured him into selling his company, rather than competing with the social network’s newly released App Center. In an open letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted to his blog on Wednesday, Caldwell recounted his side of a meeting with Facebook’s developer relations team, which occurred in mid-June. Prior to the meeting, App.net was working on a mobile app that would let users see which apps their friends were using, and make suggestions about new apps to download. It used Facebook Connect and Facebook Open Graph to identify interesting apps and to share them with social connections, and Cald...

Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked for GigaOM, where she reported on startups and Silicon Valley. Earlier, Colleen reported for Mergermarket, an online newswire and subsidiary of the Financial Times focused on M&A. Before that, she was a contributing editor for Electronic News, the semiconductor industry trade newsletter. Colleen... ? Learn More After Scott Thompson’s unceremonious departure from Yahoo’s CEO spot earlier this year, Ross Levinsohn took over as the company’s interim chief executive — and for a while there, he was widely expected to eventually be named Yahoo’s permanent CEO. But, of course, that’s not what ended up happening. This month, Yahoo announced that longtime Google executive Marissa Mayer would take the CEO spot. And now it’s official that Levinsohn will not be sticking around to see how it plays out. His last day is tomorrow. The news was first reported in a post today by AllThingsD’s K...

It didn’t start with a monkey, or a tiger. Or even a million-dollar blowout with Snoop performing in a hazy fog. For me, it started with schwag. Lots and lots of schwag. So much, in fact, that in 2006 a group of enterprising tech folks at RubyRed Labs started a side company named Valleyschwag, selling leftover tech schwag for $15. You read that correctly; people would willingly pay a $15 monthly subscription to get poorly-sized, Hanes Beefy T’s with now-defunct tech logos on them. And it was positioned as an opportunity; to quote Michael Arrington on this very site, “sometimes it’s easy to forget that a lot of people out there don’t have the opportunity to get schwag from their favorite startups.” Times, how they have changed (though I still do cherish my Dodgeball shirt). The Valleyschwag Hoedown was the first ‘tech party’ that I experienced in San Francisco. It wasn’t lavish, it lacked pretension, and I believe it may have been BYOB. There wasn’t an agenda; it was like-minded peopl...

Editor’s note: Rebekah Cox is a product designer at Quora and previously a product design lead at Facebook. This post is a followup to a recent tweet, and first appeared on Quora. It’s important to understand what identity isn’t: Identity is not a password, it’s not root access, it’s not your calendar, it’s not your email, it’s not a technical achievement, it’s not your location, it’s not a user account in a system, it’s not your contacts and it’s not a feature. So, what is identity? I think in its most basic form, your identity is the product of how you manage your attention and others’ access to that attention. Those areas where your attention is focused assemble to form a set of experiences that shape and influence where you’ll direct future attention. But that attention is interrupted all the time by people, events, things, desires, boredom, weather, etc. and that process of interruption is, largely, contained to physical space because that is a natural gate on access. Then ther...

Anthony Ha is a writer at TechCrunch, where he covers media, advertising, and startups. Previously, he was a staff technology writer at Adweek, worked as a senior editor at the tech blog VentureBeat, and was also a reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing.... ? Learn More Thomson Reuters announced today that it has made a deal to acquire a brand protection company called MarkMonitor for an undisclosed sum. The MarkMonitor website says the company offers a suite of products and services that include brand protection (i.e., protecting trademarks and commerce), anti-piracy, anti-fraud, and domain management. The Wikimedia Foundation recently moved all of its sites from GoDaddy to MarkMonitor (as noted by The Next Web). The company says it serves more than half of brands on the Fortune 100. MarkMonitor has more than 400 employees in five countries, and the team (including CEO Irfa...

Meteor, the company behind an application development framework of the same name, today announced $11.2 series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz, with Matrix Partners also contributing. The investment follows Andreessen Horowitz’ record breaking $100 million investment in Github. The Meteor framework is free and open source and can be used for creating rich, Google Docs style applications in the browser. A preview was released last April. The company plans to monetize the product by selling enterprise support and services. Meteor was founded by ActBlue co-founder Matt DeBergalis, MixApp co-founder Nick Martin and early Asana employee/MixApp co-founder Geoff Schmidt. David Greenspan, who co-founded AppJet (the company behind EtherPad) and went on to work on Google Wave, is another early employee. These are guys who know how to build richly interactive, real-time web apps. And they know painful it can be to develop modern, desktop-like apps for the browser. It takes a lot of work to b...

Palo Alto Networks shares climbed 26% in its first day of trading today on the New York Stock Exchange.  Shares closed at $53, up from its $42 offering price.The company offered 6.3 million shares in trading. The price of the share were originally offered at range of $34 to $37. It was increased to a range of $38 to $40 earlier in the week. Palo Alto Networks has a proprietary hardware and software technology that detects data threats as they come into an enterprise environment. It’s made for the new types of attacks that come through the web in the form of malware. It is designed for all the ways people access the web, either through their laptops or their mobile devices. It goes beyond what traditional firewalls are capable of doing. Most networking technology is meant for threats that come from basic email or web browsing. But today’s threats come in the form of botnet attacks and other modern techniques such as phishing attacks. Here’s how the company describes what they do when ...